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Mandy Harvey

Mandy Harvey is young, beautiful and talented. She’s an accomplished jazz singer with a sweet melodious voice and a calm, easy confidence. Mandy is also completely deaf. If singing is 90 percent listening, Mandy’s ability defies reason.

Mandy agrees. “What I do doesn’t make sense. I just push that thought out of my head and go for it, having faith that the notes will be there.”Although I don’t understand, I appreciate that music touches us at a level beyond sound or reason.

“When I sing I hear the song in my head like an old memory,” Mandy explains. “I’ve always loved jazz and I know a ton of songs. I just (mentally) hammer down the key I want to sing a song in.
“I can learn new songs, although it’s a slow and difficult process. If it is an easy song, I plunk out the first few notes [on a piano] and then sight read the song. For harder songs I need someone to play the notes and tell me when I match them.”

Before she lost her hearing at age 18, Mandy was a music major at CSU. She sang in every possible group throughout her public school years. “I would have sung in the men’s choir if that had been possible,” she quipped. Inspired by her high school choir teacher, she decided to become a music teacher herself.

During her freshman year she began having hearing problems. “Due to nerve damage, for which there was no identifiable cause,

I completely lost my hearing over the next nine months.”

I asked Mandy what she misses most. “My dad’s voice,” she replied without hesitation. “We would talk together and, although my family always joked that my dad is ‘uni-tuned’ (all his songs tend to sound the same), we used to play guitar and sing together. We still do,” she added, “but I don’t get to hear his voice.”

It’s been less than three years since Mandy’s world became silent. “I felt that my whole world was falling apart,” she told me. “I fell into a depression; my dreams of music were dying. It was the hardest and darkest time of my life.

“Just before I was dropped from the music program, we had the Freshman Voice Studio Recital,” Mandy remembers. “It was my last opportunity to sing as a music student. It felt like the last time I was ever going to sing. I had to hold onto the piano to feel the vibrations so I’d know the beat of the song. When I finished singing my fellow students gave me deaf applause.

“I didn’t sing for a year after that. Eventually I rejoined choirs and other singing groups. Then several months ago I met with voice teacher Cynthia Vaughn. We played around with jazz songs for an hour or two and then she introduced me to Mark Sloniker. He let me sing a few songs at Jay’s Bistro where he plays and I have been welcomed and asked to sing there ever since.”

I had the chance to hear Mandy at Jay’s Bistro where she sings every Thursday night. Mandy and Mark concur before each song, setting the tempo together. “Mark plays the chord from when I come in, and that helps me put the key in my head,” Mandy told me. “He cues me with a nod when I start. We’ve developed our own sign language. Most of the time it works very well, and when it doesn’t, Mark and the other musicians are so good at improv, they cover any blunders I create.”

Mandy has always loved jazz and the freedom it gives her to be who she is. “What’s beautiful about jazz is that the song is different every time I sing it. It’s forever changing; there’s nothing conforming or constricting about it.

“I have a gift I want to share. I hope to inspire people. I love to sing and I just do it. I have no investment in how I sound; I don’t hear anything that comes out of my mouth. I sing and that’s it. There’s no critiquing myself afterward.

“I’ve lost the ability to be completely afraid of anything.”

To hear Mandy sing is to experience a miracle of hope, courage and inspiration. Not because we witness the impossible, but because Mandy reminds us that all things are possible.

She demonstrates the power available to us when we give up our attachment to outcome and focus only on what we do now. She reminds us that through doing what we love and giving what we have, we enter a realm of hope and possibility. We experience freedom to be all that we are.

Jan Waterman is a writer, teacher and learner who is passionate about life and discovering what is true. She hopes that what she writes will open people to considering new thoughts and ideas about their spiritual selves. waterman@frii.com